Capacity: Advocate of the High Court of South Africa
Admission as an advocate: 1995
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Black
Date of Birth: December 1972
Qualifications: B Iuris (1992) (University of Venda), LLB (1994) (University of Pretoria), LLM (1997) (UNISA), MBA (2013) (Wits Business School)
Key Judgments
- Mthembu v Special Investigating Unit and Another (21441/2020) [2023] ZAGPPHC 59 (2 February 2023)
- Peter v Commissioner for the South African Revenue Service (A162/20) [2022] ZAGPPHC 550 (18 July 2022)
- Vallabh v Health Professions Council of South Africa (45555/18) [2020] ZAGPPHC 629 (30 October 2020)
- Van den Berg v Minister of Defence and Military Veterans (62298/11) [2017] ZAGPPHC 852 (17 November 2017)
- Kgori v Nkoana and Others (6480/19) [2020] ZAGPPHC 658 (11 November 2020)
Candidate Biography | Updated August 2026:
Ms Muvhango Antoinette Lukhaimane is an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa.
Notably, she is also South Africa’s longest-serving Pension Funds Adjudicator. Born in Mankweng, Limpopo, Lukhaimane completed her LLB at the University of Pretoria in 1994 on a Centre for Human Rights bursary, as part of the last LLB class taught in Afrikaans, assisting with human-rights and constitutional-law research along the way.
She was admitted as an advocate in 1995 and practised part-time in bail, labour and maintenance matters, while lecturing at the University of Venda and serving as an assessor in the Thohoyandou High Court.
She had taken her first law degree, a B Iuris, at the University of Venda, representing it at a Southern African moot-court competition in Harare. She went on to add an LLM in constitutional and labour law from UNISA and, in 2013, an MBA from the Wits Business School, a mix that well reflects her time in financial services.
From 2000, her career was in financial-services law. She held compliance and legal roles at Sanlam Employee Benefits, Liberty, the Eskom Pension and Provident Fund and the State Security Agency, before joining the Office of the Pension Funds Adjudicator as Deputy Adjudicator in 2012 and as Adjudicator in 2013.
While serving in this position, Lukhaimane explained that she inherited a seven-year complaints backlog and cleared it within two years, and that she motivated for the creation of the Financial Services Tribunal to give parties a free internal review of her determinations.
Her determinations carried the legal force of a High Court judgment. Where they were challenged, on review or appeal before the High Court, the Supreme Court of Appeal or the Constitutional Court, they were, as she puts it, upheld in every case but one, in which the Constitutional Court agreed she had rightly set aside the fund’s decision but held that she should first have given the fund an opportunity to reply to further submissions.
Alongside that office, Lukhaimane has acted as a judge of the Gauteng Division across some 98 weeks since 2017, hearing both civil and criminal work.
Her judgments range across an array of matters. Amongst her reported judgments are Vallabh v Health Professions Council of South Africa, a contempt matter, and Mthembu v Special Investigating Unit, in which she set aside an SIU report as falling outside the powers of its proclamation. In Van den Berg v Minister of Defence and Military Veterans, she dealt with an unlawful-detention damages claim, and in Kgori v Nkoana, she dealt with the validity of a customary marriage. Notably, she has also sat on a series of criminal appeals.
Lukhaimane comes before the JSC with a deep specialisation in pension and financial-services law and a substantial acting record. The question for the Commission will be whether that specialist, quasi-judicial background translates into readiness for the full generalist docket of the Gauteng High Court.